On Tuesday, July 15, 1997:
Joanna Goltzmann wrote:
"I also was bothered by the sex scenes in some of the feminist sf books
I've been reading until I realized that those scenes are more about
societal issues than about relationships between specific individuals.
Such scenes experiment with and challenge gender rolse, societal norms, and
taboos.... Feminist SF sex scenes are anything but boing because there's so
much going on in them besides sex."
My reply:
Exactly! This is what I tried to get across to my students. But like most
undergraduates today, my students are unsophisticated readers they could
only focus on instances in the novel which shocked them. In fact there
were only two students who didn't have a real problem with the novel. They
were older and more open-minded than some of the other students.
I taught Samuel Delany's _Tales from Nerveryon_ last year in a freshman
composition class. The odd thing is that the students didn't seem to
complain about the presence of a homosexual relationship between Gorgik and
Small Sarg. It was the women who were most open to reading and discussing
these issues. The male students seemed to be somewhat discomforted by the
reading material. On the other hand, a colleague of mine really focused on
sexuality and feminism in her class and received a huge amount of
resistance from her students. Here's an interesting question. Would this
have something to do with the differences in gender between myself and my
colleague? Do students tend to respect male teachers and their
idiosyncratic interests more than female teachers and their interests?
Erik
Erik Tsao
Graduate Student
Department of English
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI
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